Operation Overflight Read online

  Collins also informed me he would be in communication when necessary. If for any reason I had to reach him, there was a telephone number to memorize. There would be an answer at all hours of the day or night.

  During our meetings I had several times referred to the Central Intelligence Agency as the CIA. Each time, Collins had winced slightly. When he or the other men referred to it, it was always “the government,” or, most often, “the agency.” Almost automatically, I fell into the same habit.

  I was learning.

  Thus, I suppose, spies are made.

  ONE

  THE AGENCY

  One

  I have never thought of myself as a spy, yet in a certain sense this attitude is probably naïve, for Operation Overflight was to change many of the traditional definitions of espionage, providing a bridge between the age of the “deep-cover” cloak-and-dagger agent and that of the wholly electronic spy-in-the-sky satellite.

  Although as a boy I had dreamed of myself in many roles, interestingly enough, being a spy was not one of them. Looking back, however, I can see almost an inevitability in the events that led me to that motel door.

  Born August 17, 1929, in Burdine, Kentucky, in the heart of the Appalachian coal-mining country, I was the second of six children of Oliver and Ida Powers. The other five were girls. The lone boy was not to follow in his father’s footsteps, however. From as early as I can remember, I was to become a doctor, not through any choice of my own but because that was what my father had decided I was to be.

  His reasons were simple: doctors made money, their families suffering few hardships. A coal miner most of his years, he had known only the harshest kind of life.

  A close call in the mine while I was a child had cemented his resolve. While he was working as brakeman on a “motor,” an electric engine used to pull strings of coal cars, another motor had rammed his, the force of the collision pinning him against the roof of the mine. When other miners finally extricated him, his hip was badly injured. Neither the resultant limp nor the recurrent pain kept him out of the mines, however; it was the only work available. One of my first jobs as a boy, in Harmon, Virginia, had been to walk up to the mine each morning to see if there was work that day. These being years of the Depression, more often than not there wasn’t. Sometimes at night I could hear my parents talking, not about where the next dollar was coming from, but the next nickel. Many days there wasn’t enough money for a loaf of bread.

  Fortunately my sisters and I were spared the agonies of envy. None of our friends and neighbors had much more. It was a poor region.

  Growing up the only boy in a family of five girls made me something of a loner. Reading was my main pastime. History, historical fiction—other times, other places—fascinated me. One of my greatest disappointments as a boy occurred when I read of Admiral Byrd’s discovery of Antarctica. It seemed there were no new worlds left unfound, that all the great discoveries had been made.

  Much of the time that I wasn’t reading I spent outdoors. Although, together with the other boys, I swam in the local rivers and streams, did some fishing and a little hunting—rabbit, squirrel, bird—I most enjoyed getting off by myself and tramping the Cumberland Mountains. Best of all was to sit on the edge of a high cliff on the side of a mountain and look out over the valleys. It seemed to give me a perspective I couldn’t find in my daily routine.

  Green, hilly, with abundant trees, it was beautiful country, the Virginia-Kentucky border territory—or would have been, except for the mines. Their presence poisoned everything, the water in the streams, the hope in the miners’ lives. They scarred the landscape, made people like my mother and father old before their time.

  Yet even on the mountaintop I couldn’t see any other horizons for myself. An obedient son, I had accepted my father’s decision that I was to be a doctor, though the prospect interested me not at all.

  My father had a second dream—to get out of the mines himself. He tried repeatedly, even enlisting as a private in the Army for three years, at twenty-one dollars per month. But always he returned underground.

  I had the same restlessness. Two incidents during my teens contributed to it.

  When I was about fourteen my father and I took a short trip through West Virginia, passing an airport outside Princeton. A fair was in progress, a large sign offered airplane rides for two and a half dollars. I begged my father to let me go up. He finally relented. The war was on now, the mines operating at full capacity, and money was no longer quite so scarce.

  The plane, which seemed incredibly large to me at the time, was a Piper Cub. The female pilot, viewed from the vantage point of my fourteen years, seemed like an old woman, but was probably about twenty. My enthusiasm was so obvious that she kept me up double time. As my father remembers it, when we returned to earth I told him, “Dad, I left my heart up there.” I don’t recall saying it, but I probably did, since it came as close to describing my feelings as anything could. There was something very special about it. Like climbing mountains, only better.

  Much as I enjoyed it, however, it led to no great decision regarding my future; that was already decided.

  In 1945, during my junior year in high school, my father took a job at a defense plant in Detroit and moved the family there. It was a world apart from Appalachia. The patriotic fever of the times was contagious, and everyone seemed to be doing something for his country. Except me. Though I was certain my father would never give his permission, I was determined, on finishing high school the following year, to enlist in the Navy.

  But the war ended in 1945, and we returned to the Cumberlands, where I finished my last year of high school, at Grundy, Virginia.

  I was keenly disappointed to have missed World War II.

  This feeling was compounded when I started college the following fall. The school, Milligan College, near Johnson City, in east Tennessee, was, like all colleges at the time, packed with returning veterans, each with stories of his wartime exploits. I envied them. It seemed I had been born too late for the important things.

  I hadn’t really wanted to go to college, but was simply going along with my father’s intention that I become a doctor. I got through the premed courses, but barely; the interest wasn’t there. Too, at home nearly everyone had been poor. At college this wasn’t the case. Others had cars, new clothes, spending money. What money I earned—waiting table, washing dishes, scrubbing and waxing floors, all the typical college chores—went toward my expenses. Now in my late teens, I wanted to get out on my own, cut parental ties, be independent.

  My youthful rebellion didn’t take place all at once, but in stages, the first actually occurring the summer between high school and college, when, knowing I would need money to supplement my father’s savings, I took the only work available that paid a decent wage. It was also the one thing my father had vowed his son would never do: work in a mine.

  In high school I had played left guard on the football team. At Milligan I went out for track, running the 100-yard dash, 220, broad jump, 440- and 880-yard relays. Caves abounding in the area, I took up “spelunking.” It didn’t satisfy my yearnings for adventure, only fired them.

  Being a church school, Milligan offered less than most colleges in the way of excitement.

  There was none, I decided, in premed, at least not for me. To be a doctor required a special type of person. Whatever that was, I wasn’t it. My junior year, much to my father’s displeasure, I dropped premed, retaining as majors the two subjects which did interest me, biology and chemistry.

  Summers, while at home, I worked at various construction jobs: helping build a bridge across a river; laying railroad track; digging a tunnel through a mountain between Virginia and Kentucky; erecting a tipple, a mechanism that grades, washes, and loads coal. None was a job that appealed to me as a possible occupation. More and more I began thinking of enlisting in the service, at least until deciding what I really wanted to do. Although I had not been aloft since, I had never forgotten the e
xcitement of that first airplane ride. During my senior year in college I applied for Air Force Cadets, took the tests, passed them, and was accepted. All that remained was to sign the papers, which I intended to do the moment I graduated.

  Finally, it seemed, I was going to make the break.

  My father, meantime, had made an important break of his own. Some years earlier he had bought into a shoe-repair shop, in time buying out his partner. While my father was in the mines, my mother kept the shop open, collecting work for him to do when his shift ended. Eventually he was able to make shoe repairing a full-time occupation, finally escaping the mines.

  That his only son also wanted to make a change was something he refused to accept.

  At this time my family was living in Pound, Virginia, or The Pound, as it is known locally. Ages ago, the river had formed a natural bend, in the shape of a U. The Indians had discovered that by closing the gap at the top with a fence they had a natural corral, or pound, for horses. The first white settlers had turned the same three hundred acres into farmland. My grandfather had owned a small farm there since the start of the century. By moving onto a portion of his land, my parents were able to raise their own produce, supplementing earnings from the shoe shop.

  Except for my family, there was nothing in The Pound to keep me there. Realizing this, my father, noting that I had been away from home four long years, argued that I owed it to my mother to remain home for at least a few months.

  Again, I was an obedient son, although this time less easily so. Reluctantly I passed up the chance to go into Cadets.

  In June, 1950, I received my Bachelor of Science degree from Milligan; the North Koreans moved into South Korea; and, while many of my classmates enlisted or were recalled, I got a job as lifeguard at a swimming pool in nearby Jenkins.

  With a war in progress, it now became obvious even to my father that eventually I would have to go into the service. Changing tactics slightly, he tried to persuade me to wait for the draft. That way I would have to serve only two years in the Army; the shortest enlistment in the Air Force was four.

  But I wanted to fly. That October, two months after turning twenty-one, I finally made the break, enlisting in the United States Air Force for four years.

  After basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, outside San Antonio, Texas, I was sent to Lowry AFB, at Denver, Colorado, for photo school. On graduation, I was assigned to Westover, Massachusetts, where I worked as a photo lab technician.

  While at Lowry I had reapplied for Air Cadets. Approval was finally received, and in November of 1951 I went to Greenville, Mississippi, for training.

  Aviation Cadets was rough, intentionally so. But the concentrated work made me able to solo after only twenty hours’ flight time. The plane was a T-6, a large, 550-horsepower holdover that had been a first-line fighter plane back in the thirties. For the last ten hours of training, the instructor had rarely touched the controls. Realizing that he wasn’t there, that the back seat was empty, and I was completely alone, came as a decided shock—immediately followed by a tremendous feeling of self-assurance: I really didn’t need help, I was in full control. One of the real joys of flying, and a feeling that never dissipates but mellows the more you fly, is the satisfaction of total responsibility, of being dependent solely on yourself.

  But long before discovering this, on touching down after that first solo, I knew that flying would be my life work.

  After completing six months’ basic flight training, there followed another six months’ advanced flight training at Williams AFB, Arizona, where I checked out on the T-33 and F-80. Graduating from Cadets in December, 1952, with silver wings over my left breast pocket and a shiny new second lieutenant’s bar on each shoulder, I was sent to Luke AFB, near Phoenix, for gunnery school with the F-84G, on orders to Korea.

  Appendicitis stopped me in the middle of training. Because of lost time in the hospital, I was washed back to the next class. By the time I graduated, signing of the armistice was imminent.

  Again I felt I’d lost my chance to fight, to prove myself.

  Given as choice of duty assignments peacetime Korea, Maine, or Georgia, I chose the last, and in July, 1953, reported to the 468th Strategic Fighter Squadron of the 508th Strategic Fighter Wing at Turner AFB, near Albany, Georgia.

  Survival school at Hazlehurst, Georgia, and advanced survival school at Stead AFB, outside Reno, Nevada, followed. In addition to regular survival training, such as how to live with minimum provisions in a desolate area, and simulated parachute jumps from a fifty-foot tower, there were additional lessons, gathered from experiences of the Korean War, for use in the event of enemy capture. We were briefed on brainwashing techniques and we were given the task of compiling a list of questions that could be used to establish a positive identification if, for instance, we were captured and there was a prisoner exchange. These were personal things the enemy would be unlikely to know, such as mother’s maiden name, family birthdates, the position I played on the high school football team, the name of my coach. At the time, with no war in sight, it seemed unlikely I would ever have occasion to put much of this to use. Some of the training I was given, I hoped I’d never have to use. In October, 1953, I was put on special orders to report to the top-secret Sandia Base in New Mexico, for Delivery Course DD50. This was a deceptively simple title for the actual instruction—how to load and drop atomic bombs from fighter aircraft. The course, which included lectures on how atomic bombs were made and detonated, of necessity gave us not only glimpses into the extent of our nuclear preparedness but also a very clear idea of U.S. operational plans in the event of war.

  It was more than just a glimpse. Should a certain alert be called, I was assigned a place to report, where an aircraft, complete with nuclear payload, would be gassed up and waiting. As preparation, I was given navigational charts so I could memorize the route I was to take. And I was thoroughly briefed on my specific assigned target, on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

  In July, 1954, I made first lieutenant, bringing about a good increase in pay, enough to justify a big step the following April, when I married Barbara Gay Moore.

  Barbara and I had met in August, 1953, one month after I reported to Turner AFB, introduced by her mother, a cashier in the PX cafeteria.

  Barbara was a very pretty, impetuous girl of eighteen. The courtship that followed was long and erratic, with one or the other of us breaking off the engagement a half-dozen times. Although I was twenty-five, presumably old enough to know better, we decided that once we were married our problems would cease. It didn’t happen that way.

  I had been hoping, when my enlistment expired in December, 1955, to become a pilot for one of the commercial airlines. On checking, however, I found that at twenty-six-and-one-half I was at the upper edge of the age limit, and therefore not eligible. Considering the other alternatives—there were few, if I wanted to fly—I signed an indefinite enlistment.

  There was no reason to be dissatisfied, I suppose. Though our marriage was less than ideal, we had good friends, enjoyed many of the same things. Most of our vacations were spent in Florida, swimming and water-skiing. As for my job, I was doing what I most enjoyed, flying. My pay, over four hundred dollars per month take-home, was the most money I had ever earned in my life and was supplemented by what Barbara made. I was visiting parts of the world I had never seen before: I had flown an F-84G to England, and prior to my marriage, I’d spent three months on temporary duty in Japan. Periodically, as a break from routine, there was the excitement of the Air Force gunnery meets, my team taking several top command prizes. I had the satisfaction of knowing that my job was important, not only in the future, if war ever occurred, but now, as a small but necessary part of a collective defense effort in itself a deterrent to war.

  There was no reason to be dissatisfied, yet I was. The vague restlessness since boyhood remained—not so much of an ache now, but a bother nonetheless. To date I hadn’t really proved myself, contributed anything.


  This was my frame of mind when I was approached by “the agency.”

  Two

  Late in January, 1956, as Francis G. Palmer, a civilian employee of the Department of the Air Force, according to the official identification in my wallet, I signed the register at the Du Pont Plaza, Washington, D.C., went to my room, and waited for a telephone call, all the while feeling more than a little foolish. Such antics belonged in the realm of spy stories.

  When the call came, the voice was that of Collins, informing me we were to meet in another room. Most of the other pilots were already there. Except for one man busily looking behind picture frames, back of dresser drawers, under beds, and whom I took to be an employee of the agency, everyone was familiar. A number of the men were from Turner AFB.

  Collins handled the briefing, more informal and relaxed than any of those at the motel. Yet in its way, more serious.

  This would not be the first attempt to photograph Russia from the air. Following World War II, modified B-36s and, later, RB-47s, had been used. These had a great advantage—the capacity to carry large quantities of sophisticated photographic and electronic equipment. But disadvantages were also great. Because the altitude at which they flew was well within the range of Russian radar, they were vulnerable to both missiles and fighters and therefore couldn’t be risked on anything other than short-range penetration missions. The most important targets, however, those in which Intelligence was most interested, were deep inside Russia. And, though unarmed and carrying only cameras and electronic gear rather than bombs, they were still, to the uninformed observer, bombers. As such, they could cause an incident.

  Then something different had been tried—huge camera-carrying balloons. Set adrift at various points, these were picked up by prevailing winds and carried across the Soviet Union to Japan, where U.S. planes were sent up to shoot them down. Although this had netted some valuable footage, the limitations were obvious, and the Russians, who had shot down more than a few balloons themselves, had protested.